Francis Brinkley

“ Saigō saw in a foreign war the sole remaining chance of achieving his ambition by lawful means. The government’s conscription scheme, yet in its infancy, had not produced even the skeleton of an army. If Korea had to be conquered, the samurai must be employed; and their employment would mean, if not their rehabilitation, at least their organization into a force which, under Saigō’s leadership, might dictate a new policy. Other members of the cabinet believed that the nation would be disgraced if it tamely endured Korea’s insults. Thus several influential voices swelled the clamour for war. ”

“ A Japanese picture is not painted simply for the sake of representative effect: it is part of a decorative scheme. There is no such thing in Japan, there never could have been any such thing, as a picture gallery—a place whither people repair to look at pictures merely for the sake of pictures. The painter, so far as concerned the ultimate uses of his work, ranked with the joiner, the plasterer, and the paper-hanger. ”

“ Their first eight representatives were talented and upright administrators. They took justice, simplicity and truth for guiding principles; they despised luxury and pomp; they never aspired to high official rank; they were content with two provinces for estates, and they sternly repelled the effeminate, depraved customs of Kiōto.” Thus the greater part of the 13th century was, on the whole, a golden era for Japan, and the lower orders learned to welcome feudalism. Nevertheless no century furnished more conspicuous illustrations of the peculiarly Japanese system of vicarious government. ”

“ What perplexes many students, too, is that the same brush dashes out at one moment a design of colossal boldness, and devotes itself, the next, to work of marvellous detail. Let us, by way of illustration, refer to Kanaoka and Hokusai, names very familiar to Western connoisseurs, the first because he is erroneously supposed to have laid the foundation of pictorial art in Japan, the second because, with equal error, he is imagined to stand at its pinnacle. ”

“ These Chinese scholars made no secret of their contempt for Buddhism, and in their turn they were held in aversion by the Buddhists and the Japanese scholars (wagakusha) , so that the second half of the 18th century was a time of perpetual wrangling and controversy. The worshippers at the shrine of Chinese philosophy evoked a reactionary spirit of nationalism, just as the excessive worship of Occidental civilization was destined to do in the 19th century. ”

“ The slightest insult to their honour might not be condoned. Stoicism was a quality which they esteemed next to courage: all outward display of emotion must be suppressed. The sword might never be drawn for a petty cause, but, if once drawn, must never be returned to its scabbard until it had done its duty. Martial exercises occupied much of their attention, but book learning also they esteemed highly. They were profoundly courteous towards each other, profoundly contemptuous towards the commoner, whatever his wealth. Filial piety ranked next to loyalty in their code of ethics. ”

“ Even the great founders of the Kano School, men whose works support comparison with the masterpieces of Chinese genius, had no fear of degrading their art or alienating aristocratic patronage when they depicted episodes from the kitchen, the stable, the farm-yard and the work-shop. The truth is that in the rise and development of the Popular School we must trace, not a new artistic departure, but simply a reflection of the changes which the civilization of the era was undergoing. ”

“ Among the five, four were sincere reformers—not free, of course, from selfish motives, but truthfully bent upon promoting the interests of their country before all other aims. The fifth, Saigō Takamori, was a man in whom boundless ambition lay concealed under qualities of the noblest and most enduring type. His absolute freedom from every trace of sordidness gave currency to a belief that his aims were of the simplest; the story of his career satisfied the highest canons of the samurai ”

“ What has been said above of painting applies with equal truth to sculpture. In both alike the impress of Japanese genius shows itself chiefly in tenderness, grace, and, above all, humour. It is doubtful whether the Japanese pictorial artist ever scaled the heights on which the greatest of the Chinese masters stood. It is virtually certain that the converse is true in the case of sculpture. But these are mere differences of degree. The distinction becomes radical only when we consider the characteristics of humour, tenderness, and grace. ”

“ Thus the convening of a diet and the sudden transfer of financial and legislative authority from the throne and its entourage of tried statesmen to the hands of men whose qualifications for public life rested on the verdict of electors, themselves apparently devoid of all light to guide their choice—this sweeping innovation seemed likely to tax severely, if not to overtax completely, the progressive capacities of the nation. ”

“ While accepting the indisputable truth that the art of Japan in its greatest phases is but a reflection of the art of China—a reflection frequently vying with its original in vigour and vitality, but more frequently displaying the weaknesses incidental to imitations in general—we must avoid the inference that the native genius of the Chinese artist was wholly responsible for his successes. ”

“ These are the characteristics that render the story of political evolution in Japan so perplexing to a foreign student. He looks for differences of platform and finds none. Just as a true Liberal must be a Progressist, and a true Progressist a Liberal, so, though each may cast his profession of faith in a mould of different phrases, the ultimate shape must be the same. The mainsprings of early political agitation in Japan were personal grievances and a desire to wrest the administrative power from the hands of the statesmen who had held it so long as to overtax the patience of their rivals. ”

“ The ukiyo-ye seems, in short, to have arrived in the regular order of evolution, for the artist passed from a knowledge of low keys and simple colour compositions, developed in the Chinese schools, to a profound sense of the wider scope and fuller harmony of high, diversified colours, and thus succeeded in combining the flame and glow of sunshine brilliancy with the tenderness and refinement of twilight tints. ”

“ The problem of real interest is to separate foreign inspiration from native originality; to determine whether this art, which has so greatly moved the world in modern times, is a mere by-product of inspiration emanating in the first place from Greece, and becoming more and more deflected from the line of identity as it passed through the refracting media of Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese assimilations, or whether any part of it may be regarded as the unmixed offspring of Japanese genius. ”

“ Old people cannot fit their feet to new roads without some clumsiness. The Japanese had grown very old in their special paths, and their novel departure was occasionally disfigured by solecisms. The refined taste that guided them unerringly in all the affairs of life as they had been accustomed to live it, seemed to fail them signally when they emerged into an alien atmosphere. ”

“ It may be laid down as axiomatic that an intimate relationship exists between Japanese caligraphy and Japanese painting, and that the Japanese eye detects in brush strokes an æsthetic beauty too subtle to appeal to men living outside the ideographic pale. Touch, as has been well said by a great connoisseur of Japanese pictorial art, is not by any means the most important quality in a picture, but it nevertheless contributes largely to the flavour and vitality of an artist’s work. ”

“ Thus the Confucian maxim, endorsed explicitly in the Testament of Iyeyasu, that a man must not live under the same sky with his father’s murderer or his brother’s slayer, received most literal obedience, and many instances occurred of vendettas pursued in the face of apparently insuperable difficulties and consummated after years of effort. By the standard of modern morality the Japanese samurai would be counted cruel. ”

“ We speak here of the rank and file of the profession—the men who, being without originality of conception, are obliged to substitute skill of pencil, and who find in the mere processes of the great masters a sufficient equipment for the purposes of every-day art. Unfortunately such mechanists of the brush have abounded in every era. Their skill as copyists constitutes a barrier to foreign appreciation of true Japanese art. How many collectors or connoisseurs in Europe or America have had an opportunity of examining genuine works of great Japanese painters? ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the practice of employing torture judicially tended to educate a mood of callousness towards suffering, or that the many idle hours of a military man’s life in time of peace encouraged a measure of dissipation. But there does not seem to be any valid ground for concluding that either of these defects was conspicuous in the character of the Japanese samurai. Faithlessness towards women was the greatest fault that can be laid to his door. ”

“ All the great political changes in Japan had formerly been preceded by wars culminating in the accession of some strong clan to supreme authority, whereas in this case there had been a displacement without a substitution—the Tokugawa had been overthrown and no new administrators had been set up in their stead. It was, moreover, certain that an attempt on the part of any one clan to constitute itself executor of the sovereign’s mandates would have stirred the other clans to vehement resistance. ”

“ Japanese pictures are hidden away among the heirlooms of temples or in the store-houses of noblemen and wealthy merchants. They are practically inaccessible. A not uninterested or unintelligent observer may have lived for years in Japan before the trivial estimate he has formed of Sesshu, of Shiubun, of Motonobu, of Cho Densu, of Tanyu, or of the other masters is rudely disturbed some morning by a revelation that startles him into a new belief. He may never have that revelation at all. The chances are a thousand to one that it never comes to a resident of a foreign settlement. ”

“ The Restoration statesmen were the men who had made Modern Japan; the men who had raised her, in the face of immense obstacles, from the position of an insignificant Oriental state to that of a formidable unit in the comity of nations; the men, finally, who had given to her a constitution and representative institutions. ”

“ One of the facts which the student of the Far East soon learns to expect is that Occidental precedents must be reversed to suit Japanese methods. In Europe or America the engraver, even though a copyist, must be a skilled draughtsman: must be able to draw with perfect accuracy an inverted, and often a reduced, reproduction of the original. Hence the credit of the picture does not belong solely to the artist but is shared equally by the engraver. In Japan the engraver has no honour: he is a mere artisan. ”

“ It may be said of all Japanese painters down to the twelfth century, perhaps even down to the thirteenth, that they regarded the religious picture as the field of highest achievement, and that, when their subject was a Buddhist divinity, a Nirvana, an Arhat, or a Rishi, they sought inspiration either directly from the Chinese masters or indirectly from the latter’s most famous disciples. Religious paintings, like religious propagandism, appeal either to the intellect or to the senses. ”

“ They were told that they might lay aside their swords, and many of them did so, though from time immemorial they had cherished the sword as the mark of a gentleman, the most precious possession of a warrior, and the one outward evidence that distinguished men of their order from common toilers after gain. They saw themselves deprived of their military employment, were invited to surrender more than one-half of the income it brought, and knew that they were unprepared alike by education and by tradition to earn bread in any calling save that of arms. ”

“ In a comparative sense the epithet “Conservative” might have been applied to the statesmen who proposed to defer parliamentary institutions until the people, as distinguished from the former samurai, had been in some measure prepared for such an innovation. But since these very statesmen were the guiding spirits of the whole Meiji revolution, it was plain that their convictions must be radical, and that, unless they did violence to their record, they must finally lead the country to representative institutions, the logical sequel of their own reforms. ”

“ It involves the assumption that her art has no elements permanently worthy of preservation; no intrinsic merits fit to survive independently of environment. The fact is that if the present era is without giants of the brush like Okio or Sosen, it is not without masters of great talent and high technical skill. Twenty years ago Bunrin died in Kyoto: an artist of whom it has been well said that he “fixed upon paper and silk with exquisite refinement and suggestiveness the most striking of the atmospheric effects that cast a fairyland glamour over the scenery of Japan.” ”

“ Though they showed remarkable moral courage and tenacity of purpose, the age did not furnish any strong object lesson to enforce their propaganda of progress. The factors chiefly making for change were, first, the ambition of the southern clans to oust the Tokugawa, and, secondly, the samurai’s loyal instinct, reinforced by the teachings of his country’s history, by the revival of the Shintō cult, by the promptings of national enterprise, and by the object-lessons of foreign intercourse. ”

“ They relied upon line and colour to produce effects which are due in nature to the uneven distribution, absorption, or reflection of light. Hence while they show us with admirable accuracy the folds of drapery and the patterns winding and flowing through all its plies, they fail to tell us whether the surface represented is that of velvet, or of silk, or of cotton. It has been well said that in judging pictures we must consider what the painter succeeds in doing and not be forever critical about what he fails to do. ”

“ Knowing that the opening of the diet would be a veritable letting loose of the dogs of war, an unmuzzling of the agitators whose mouths had hitherto been partly closed by legal restrictions upon free speech, but who would now enjoy complete immunity within the walls of the assembly whatever the nature of their utterances—foreseeing all this, the statesmen of the day nevertheless stood severely aloof from alliances of every kind, and discharged their administrative functions with apparent indifference to the changes that popular representation could not fail to induce. ”

“ Thus it is at once radically differentiated from the picture of Occidental art, the picture which must be seen from one special point of view and with light coming from one fixed direction. Thus, also, linear perspective and cast shadows are necessarily excluded. Vanishing points, horizon lines, and such things mean that only one aspect of a picture is delightful; every other, painful. The Japanese artist understood these things thoroughly. It has been said of him reproachfully that he remained perpetually ignorant of perspective, and that he never discovered the theory of shadows. ”

“ There festivals of various kinds, dancing, verse-composing, flower picnics, archery, polo, football—of a very refined nature—hawking, hunting and gambling absorbed the attention of the aristocracy. Nothing disturbed the serenity of the epoch except a revolt of the northern Yemishi, which was temporarily subdued by a Fujiwara general, for the Fujiwara had not yet laid aside the martial habits of their ancestors. In 794 the Imperial capital was transferred from Nara to Kiōto by order of the emperor Kwammu, one of the greatest of Japanese sovereigns. ”

“ If again we pass from the caligraphic training of the hand to the hand itself, we are confronted by a fact which the most cursory observation confirms, namely, that nature has endowed the Japanese people with hands singularly supple and sensitive. Manual dexterity ought to characterise such a nation. If we find them wielding the artist’s brush with admirable strength and accuracy, we look also to find them revelling in microscopic elaboration of detail ”